St. Louis Garlic Fest

Leafy Greens Farm kicked off their 2012 Summer festival season with a booth at the St. Louis Garlic Fest. It was a fun, family event in south St. Louis started by a bunch of urban garlic farmers. Last November, we had planted about 180 cloves of garlic and early this June we harvested all of them. Yes, garlic takes about 8-9 months to grow! After we harvested the garlic, we cleaned it, cut the stems off, and let it cure -or dry out- in the barn for about 4 weeks. Once the curing process is done, it is ready to be eaten, sold, or stored until the next planting season. Since we planted about 10 different speciality varieties of garlic, we wanted to find the right venue to sell them at. Luckily, we found out about the garlic festival so that we could sell them directly to consumers interested in trying fun, new garlics.

Our garlic varieties we sold

It was exciting talking to so people about garlic - which is considered both a vegetable and an herb. We brought other vegetables to sell, but garlic took center stage. Many people didn't know that garlics came in so many varieties and frankly we didn't know either before we started growing garlic. At the grocery stores, we typically just see one variety of porcelain white garlic, but we have read that there are over 600 cultivated sub-varieties of garlics in the world. The varieties range in flavor from mild to hot and spicy. We had a small range of flavors, but enough to intrigue some of our customers.

We shared and learned new garlics recipes as well as talked about how we prepare the soil for growing garlic. Damian used his amazing selling skills to our garlic and we ended up selling 90% of what we took to the festival. According to one consumer, we had the "cutest" garlics of the festival. We even had two celebrity sightings at the Garlic Fest, Mayor Francis Slay dropped by our booth and Garlic Man came over for a rare photo opportunity!

Mayor Slay and Garlic Man



Baked goods and canned items

One of the most surprising parts of the festival was how quick our baked goods and canned items sold. We had made garlic flat bread, zucchini bread cookies, and garlic pepper glaze. Garlic pepper glaze was the biggest hit of the day. I am not sure if it was the free sample or the awesome recipe, but we sold out of the garlic pepper glaze by 11am!